Let the four year hype begin… Last night technological wunderkind Elon Musk announced the first private passenger on his journey to the moon: Japanese billionaire, and founder of Japanese clothing company ‘Zozo,’ Yusaku Maezawa. Then, in a move that would make even Richard Branson jealous, the entrepreneur announced that he’d purchased an additional eight seats

Earlier this year Valve revealed the second iteration of its long-anticipated Knuckles motion controllers for SteamVR. The controllers, which were sent out to VR developers for testing, represented a more complete version of the successor to the position-tracked wands that come with the HTC Vive but they were far from complete.

Today, Valve revealed the next step for Knuckles.

In a blog over on Steam the company unveiled Knuckles EV3, complete with a pretty expansive list of improvements. While the controllers still look pretty close to Oculus’ Touch controllers, there are several tweaks to the design. The straps, for example, now have adjustment markings on the top plate, and the rivet is thinner to avoid interfering with the wing. The drawstring is also shorter.

Elsewhere, the back triggers have been made stronger and more reliable, while the system button has been recessed so as to avoid being accidentally pressed.

Perhaps the biggest change, at least to our eyes, is the battery life, which has been increased by up to two hours. Valve says the controllers now offer between seven to eight hours of playtime to charge.

Finally, there’s better LED light mixing, a more accessible USB port and an improved fit and finish. No major new additions, then, but the more improvements Valve makes the better the result for the end product. Knuckles also implements finger-tracking capabilities and the more recent editions have even ditched Valve’s traditional trackpad in favor of an analog stick.

Valve is promising to ship out Knuckles EV3 in “much greater quantities” that its rollout of EV2, confirming that it will open a request form “soon” and deliver to existing EV2 owners. As for the final consumer product? We still have no idea when they may arrive, though it looks doubtful that it’ll be here in 2018.

Learn more about the latest in Oculus technology while wearing the latest in Oculus technology. Oculus Connect, an annual conference dedicated to showcasing the latest advancements in Oculus VR technology, is just around the corner and with it a new heap of rumors, announcements, and excitement. For those who were unable to attend the technology

I’d love to tell you that Blind’s infuriating puzzles are frustrating for the right reasons, but I can’t. Tiny Bull Studios’ efforts to put you in the shoes of a blind person, giving you a taste of what life is like without sight are thoughtfully delivered and will stay with me for long after this review. Sadly, it’s the more traditional design elements that make Blind such a chore to play.

Simply put, Blind’s brand of puzzling, which sees you trying to escape captivity in an enormous mansion, is the antithesis of Torn, a game that favored simple challenges in order to keep the pace flowing. Tiny Bull has gone to great lengths to introduce a varied set of puzzles, but solutions are often so specific that I felt like I was hitting a roadblock every few minutes.

Take one of the game’s earliest puzzles, in which you need to find a key hidden in a library. It’s not the game’s monochrome color scheme that makes the search so draining, it’s the obscurity of the eventual solution. A grandfather clock embedded in the bookcase seems like the obvious keeper of the key, but it’s completely uninteractive.

It wasn’t until after 30 minutes of exhaustive searching that I discovered I had to, in fact, click a footstall sitting a meter or so away to watch it automatically slide over to the clock. I couldn’t use it unless I was on the stool, even though I could reach everything just fine on the floor. Then I had to put the time in the correct place according to an audio diary. When that didn’t work, it took me yet more time to discover the phrase “nearly quarter past” in a completely separate entry. Puzzles are routinely bloated in this way.

Later on, though, I had to retrieve an item stuck at the top of a fountain and yet I couldn’t use the stepladder sitting in the next room. There’s not much consistency to Blind’s world because you have to play by its rules, and those rules often feel like they’re known only to the developer. There are several more instances like this and, to be frank, I ran out of patience long before the game’s ending neared. A better hint system could have been a real game changer here, as the mystery at the center of Blind had me engaged with its characters throughout and many people won’t get to experience all of it.

It’s a real shame, as Blind’s core premise of experiencing life through the eyes of someone that can’t see is well implemented. Early only you’re given a white cane that helps navigate environments and it gives the game a good deal of authenticity. Small taps will create echoes that visualize a tiny space around you though harder swipes will reveal a much wider look at the risk of overwhelming your senses. It’s a fairly straightforward representation of what I’m sure is a much more complex condition in reality, but its simplicity also helps staves

A new patent from Sony suggests the company’s next PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset will take the fight to simulation sickness.

The patent was originally filed in early 2017 (six months after the original PSVR’s release) and published last week. It describes a system for fighting what it describes as “virtual reality sickness” using a head-mounted display (HMD) that’s fitted with a range of biometric sensors such as a thermometer, eye-tracking cameras, a moisture sensor and exterior orientation sensors.

According to the patent, the given headset would use these features to establish a “health threshold value” that could presumably tell when a VR experience was becoming too intense for the user and then act accordingly. There’s even a microphone that will listen out for “negative” words and noises that might suggest you’re having a bad time (or you’re just doing the Mr. Baker chase in Resident Evil 7).

It’s an interesting approach to solving the simulation sickness issues; many hardware and software developers are trying to reduce sickness through intelligent design but this patent suggests Sony may come up with a system that accepts people get ill in VR and tries to help them when they start feeling nauseous.

That said, based on the chart below, it looks like the system would be more concerned with alerting the VR user to their condition rather than dynamically changing the given experience for it. The number of sensors listed also frankly lean a little on the overkill side of things.

Of course, some elements of the headset could also be used in other ways. Eye-tracking, for example, is considered essential for the next step of VR. It allows for foveated rendering, which only fully renders the parts of a display you’re directly looking at, dramatically reducing the processing power required to run experiences. That could be great news for the PS5.

Interestingly enough the headset is also fitted with a battery, suggesting it may be a self-contained system. Could that mean that a hypothetical PSVR 2 would operate wirelessly, connecting to a PlayStation console over WiFi? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard mention of wireless support.

We recently reported that Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida is confident we’ll see improvements to VR comfort and immersion going forward, and elements of this patent could play a big part in that. Earlier this year we also saw a patent that suggested the company was working on new motion controllers for VR too. The only question now is if and when we’ll see all of these promising elements come to fruition?